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The Storage Brick & What to do with it harry.mangalam@uci.edu , 824-0084. email / call for the presentation / followup Detailed Storage Brick report http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/sb/ Also at the Research Computing Support Table. Storage Brick in 1 Pic & 30 Words.
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The Storage Brick & What to do with itharry.mangalam@uci.edu, 824-0084 • email / call for the presentation / followup • Detailed Storage Brick report http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/sb/ • Also at the Research Computing Support Table
Storage Brick in 1 Pic & 30 Words • Tyan mobo; 4 Opteron cores, 8GB RAM,8TB in 3U • 3xPower Supply, • 3ware or Areca PCIe RAID controller • 16x500GB hotswap SATA3 disks • 6xGb etherNICs. • 64-bit Linux. • 1yr ago, <$10K
Free/OSS Software and your data. • 'Free' != 'worthless'. • The internet runs on Free Software. • Beware of silly claims of reliability. • Be aware of what you can control and what you cannot. • Protect what needs to be protected. • Institute protection plans for that data. • Test them regularly.
Reliability vs Cost • like unfunded mandates. • "Does this data need $24 per GB storage or will 60¢ per GB suffice?" • "How many bytes and how many $?" • “Pretty Storage” - Pretty cheap, pretty secure, pretty available, pretty fast, pretty accessible, pretty flexible.
Take home messages • Always use a journaling file system. • ReiserFS (v3) for small files. • XFS for large files, also excellent for formatting and mount times. • If you have hardware RAID, use RAID6 for everything. Redundancy and performance is very good. • If you only have software RAID, use RAID5 or RAID6. • Use large RAIDs so parity loss is minimized. • Areca and 3ware both very good, very fast. • System RAM good. Card RAM less good. • readahead is almost not worth thinking about, as long as it's above 1KB. Little advantage to more than 8KB. • Battery Backup of card is critical for DB transactions, but otherwise not too helpful, especially if the entire is on UPS.
Recent Updates • Striping of the RAID is significant. Find the median size of your active files. 64K is almost always too large. • JFS is good, but dropped by IBM. • mdadm works well for cheap, slow RAIDs. • Reiser4 is very fast but in prison. • Ext4 is looking better. • ZFS (Solaris) starting to look very good.
Protocols? You want Protocols? • NFS, SMB/CIFS, Appletalk, AFS, http, https, rsync, ssh, scp, sftp, webdav, iSCSI, AoE, FiberChannel • Volume Management via LVM2 & EVMS • Hardware and Software RAIDs of all types. • Failover / High Availability / Clustering. • Virtualization – VMware, Xen, VirtualBox • Firewalls & NAT masq for multi-homing, DMZ
Filer Packages • Appliances ie USR 8700 NAS Appliance • FreeNAS – free,simple GUI, BSD-based • Openfiler - free, full-featured GUI, Linux-based • Open-e - $, sophisticated, ROM-based • Naked Linux - free, full-featured (22,553 pkgs available), partial GUI
Cheap NAS Appliances • Linux in BIOS on Freescale CPU. Just say No.
FreeNAS http://www.freenas.org • very small, very fast to install, boots from USB key • full administration via web interface • Based on small BSD from m0n0wall firewall • Protocol: CIFS (samba) , FTP, NFS, SSH, RSYNC and AFP, iSCSI target • Hard drive: ATA/SATA, SCSI, USB and Firewire • Filesystem support: UFS, FAT32, EXT2/EXT3 • Software RAID 0, 1 and 5 • Local User authentication and Microsoft Domains
OpenFiler http://www.openfiler.com • almost everything that FreeNAS has and more, incl. iSCSi. • much more complete web interface. • LDAP/AD auth • Can buy pre-installed and configured from a number of companies. • Commercial support available.
Open-e http://www.open-e.com • solid-state disk-based system. • completely plug & play. • like openfiler but commercial. • Available on ThinkCP products for an additional ~$1K.
Naked Linux • Pros: You control everything - ~24,000 free packages • Cons: Ditto.
BackupPC http://backppc.sf.net • Web-based Perl server uses smb, rsync, tar, file pooling, compression to backup files • Lots of users, list runs at an average of 11 postings/day, including the author. • In Ver 3, users use a web interface to customize their backup config & restore their own files. • Regular & on-demand Full & Incr Backups
rsync client For Win2k, WinXP • User fills out web form, submits • gets email with rsync zipfile for correct version of Windows. • unzips file at top level of C:\ drive • runs a bat file to install rsync as a startup (Win2k) or service (WinXP) • That's it. Regular Full and Incr Back • We're looking for beta-testers.
Storage Question • Would you consider using such Bricks as a service from NACS? • For what services? • Under what conditions? • What cost model? • flat $/TB? • $/TB/service? (BackupPC TB's vs NFS TB's) • $/TB/CPU